81–90 of 137 posts
I expected better from a company like Google. Asking candidates for pre-canned code snippets to cutesy little CS problems on the whiteboard is miserable and the outcome depends too much on what the candidate studied in the last few weeks before the interview. It actually tells you very little about the kind of programmer a person is and the interview itself can get quite horrible on a personal level very fast. A whil…
With a process like this (based on this story as well as others), does Google actually consistently employee competent talent? Obviously Google has landed some serious rock-star talent, but of the scores of college graduates they hire for internships or entry-level positions, does anyone know if their hiring process is working for them?
They employ a lot of people that can write code on boards, and can certainly churn it out at high velocity. But when you start looking at the actual code... it's bad. When I first looked at the chrome code, the layer they dumped on top of webkit to make it out-of-process, the only thing I could think of was "this looks like something a kid fresh out of college would cobble up together". Same thing with most of their projects - lack of clear design, hacks, hard to maintain, lack of standards, no portability. The projects that get visibility end up getting better (more competent programmers assigned to them), the rest lingers in crappiness mode.
They're not all like that, obviously. They have very smart and very competent people there. But the general low quality of their code, the lack of polish in their products, it clearly shows the consequences of hiring people based on how fast they can dump code on a whiteboard.
Mirrors my internship experience almost exactly. Three rapid-fire technical interviews that I thought went quite well, then a "sorry, no dice" email. Someone else I know just went through the same thing, also for an internship. Google sure makes a lot of noise about how they are hiring and competing for talent, but continue to turn away good people for unknown reasons.
I think Google receives around 20000 resumes per day. If you've got that kind of interest (and what I've heard, justified interest) you'll have to turn most people down (ie. >99%). I don't have inside knowledge about the Google hiring process, but with that many people applying, you're bound to have some false negatives.
It's important to know that googlers are encouraged internally to do interviews (for extra cookie points? I don't know :P), they're assigned randomly to candidates for most of the process, so they're not a part of the whole process, just a piece of the machinery. No one oversees the interviews to make sure questions are not repeated and that there's a logical thread from one to the other (especially the onsite interviews), and you might not even be asked the questions that are actually relevant for the position they're considering you for, when you're in the latter stages of the process.
The stories I've heard from the hiring trenches are all pretty much the same. It's a great company, but their hiring processes are very weird.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone isn't working on something in their spare time, it's a big red flag to me. You need to have the hunger. I'm more turned on by what you have in your github account than whether or not you can do a binary search in your choice of languages.
In my spare time I'm working on making the next million for my company. Oh, when I'm not working for my company? I'm with my family or friends. I feel like the energy I could spend doing a side project is probably better spent getting these last two features in, or fixing those lingering bugs, or getting that automation solid, etc.... It seems really odd to actually penalize someone who leaves it all on the floor. It…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting them to write code is actually pretty good. As for binary search, I wouldn't necessarily be able to bang it out in two hours in C, but I'd easily be able to bang it out in that time for any language I use regularly. And with sufficient testing I'd take a good stab at converting to C. Though I agree sometimes it can be a coin toss. Once I was asked to write some code that would take dates as inputs and do some…
"Unfortunately, I only know how to design something that works, I don't know how to fake a bad design" I was once given an interview project where they wanted to see how I did with their current code structure. They gave me this really horrible template of data that could never be used in the real world or for anything other than this project. I decided to restructure the template so I could make a useable applicatio…
Faster in performance, or faster to develop and maintain?
Most PHP apps I've come across have little need for CPU optimization. Not using built-in functions in those situations is likely to have no practical benefit except making it harder for other PHP devs to work with the code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone isn't working on something in their spare time, it's a big red flag to me. You need to have the hunger. I'm more turned on by what you have in your github account than whether or not you can do a binary search in your choice of languages.
I agree that this is the most valuable way to judge a candidate, but unfortunately I don't think it would work for most students and most companies (been through it all) because: a) students have a fair bit of school work to do, and: b) most companies can't afford the kind of talent that finds the time to work on other projects outside their normal coursework. Now, for Google that might not be the case — they certain…
With a process like this (based on this story as well as others), does Google actually consistently employee competent talent? Obviously Google has landed some serious rock-star talent, but of the scores of college graduates they hire for internships or entry-level positions, does anyone know if their hiring process is working for them?
No. They employ a lot of people that can write code on boards, and can certainly churn it out at high velocity. But when you start looking at the actual code... it's bad. When I first looked at the chrome code, the layer they dumped on top of webkit to make it out-of-process, the only thing I could think of was "this looks like something a kid fresh out of college would cobble up together". Same thing with most of th…
I wouldn't bother applying. Why the hell would you want to work a company that runs you through the gauntlet like this, only to give you the chance that maybe you'll get hired? I mean, this is obviously a really skilled guy who has lots of prospects. Why are Google so popular anyway? I genuinely don't get it and would love to know from someone who has specific knowledge. Do they pay better than everyone else? Work on…
The second year (last year), my experience was similar, except this time I bugged my recruiter pretty much every other week until I had a host interview (got TWO of them cancelled on me but finally the third one actually happened) and I got the job.
Despite the terrible process, it is an absolutely amazing place to work. Everything you've heard is true: the food is amazing, the work atmosphere is amazing, the people are geniuses. Also, the compensation is absolutely absurd for undergraduate interns (last year it was $69,600/yr prorated to $1338/wk, and this year they bumped it up to $80,000/yr prorated to $1538/wk, with a $3500 lump sum relocation stipend on top of that. I know it's even higher for grad interns but I don't know the exact numbers).
Despite the admittedly awful process (easily the worst I've been through), it was absolutely worth it to me and I'd recommend anyone stick with it and hope you get lucky like I did. It really does come down to luck whether or not you get a host interview once you've passed your two technical interviews.
I expected better from a company like Google. Asking candidates for pre-canned code snippets to cutesy little CS problems on the whiteboard is miserable and the outcome depends too much on what the candidate studied in the last few weeks before the interview. It actually tells you very little about the kind of programmer a person is and the interview itself can get quite horrible on a personal level very fast. A whil…
I think a question talking about the Django templating system when the interviewee mentions they use Django is fair game, though; and questions that revolve around 'here's a real world problem I want to do with a string, can you write a quick algorithm' are ok, but then I do things like the Greplin programming challenge for fun and I'm not even an engineer =(
I expected better from a company like Google. Asking candidates for pre-canned code snippets to cutesy little CS problems on the whiteboard is miserable and the outcome depends too much on what the candidate studied in the last few weeks before the interview. It actually tells you very little about the kind of programmer a person is and the interview itself can get quite horrible on a personal level very fast. A whil…
This is a fair point. I make a point of not asking "CS exam" questions, but I do expect candidates to be familiar with fairly common computer science concepts. (Not-an-Example: In my own interviews I was asked about things like O-notation, and I have run into many, many programmers who don't know what this is.) I think a question talking about the Django templating system when the interviewee mentions they use Django…
I agree, but it was the only good one I could find in the article.